Learnemic: Gamified Epidemics Awareness and Modeling

A gamified hybrid-education platform providing key epidemiological knowledge and real-time modeling expertise leading to general epidemic awareness, resistance to misinformation, and distributed modeling coupled with intervention efficacy assessment leveraging human creativity.

Ferenc A. Bartha, Lead Investigator at Learnemic

Assistant professor,
Mathematical Disease Modeling and Epidemiological Analysis Task Force, University of Szeged, Hungary

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that non-adherence and noncompliance significantly limit the effectiveness of interventions installed during an epidemic outbreak. These types of behaviour carry tremendous social and economic cost. Just pre-COVID-19 medication non-adherence solely is estimated to cost the US healthcare system $100B-$300B.

We are witnessing growing unrest against social distancing measures and dissatisfactory willingness for vaccination. Studies demonstrate that even as low as 7% of the population may adhere to all regulations and noncompliant behaviour may affect more than 50%. Correlation of supportive attitude was observed with numerous factors like education, understanding disease progression and transmission, trust in authorities, and higher vulnerability.

Whilst concentrating on either one or several factors is possible, even a customized explanation of the necessity of interventions would hardly be always successful. But imagine letting a person learn that very necessity by playing! And that’s something that we all share globally: as kids, we got to know our world through games, and still today - we all like to play. 

Playful mastering of epidemic-awareness - this is what we, a team consisting of teachers from academy, scientists, developers, epidemics modelers and doctors, will make a reality. 

And yes, as everyone, we do like to play.

The primary focus audience comprises users of our solutions. The gamified environment is inevitably engaging mostly younger generations and that is precisely the most risk-tolerant segment of society during an epidemic scenario. For example, it is not a specialty of COVID-19 that elder, more vulnerable age groups display significantly higher willingness for vaccination and better adherence of social distancing measures nor is it a novelty that non-compliant behavior is usually observed within the younger.

Keeping this focus, we will involve gamification specialists, behavioral scientists, game designers, augmented reality specialists, and learning professionals to continuously ensure that our solution maintains an appealing, modern look and dynamics and, also, a high degree of custom-tailored educational influence on its users. Incorporating user feedback obtained in-software and from social media platforms is a must and it will be leveraged upon to further enhance our products.

We are possibly excited the most about evaluating the results of distributed modeling - an expected outcome of the “more gamified” part of our solution. Nevertheless, it is with similar passion that we look forward to realizing the more education-oriented, non-profit arm- we are not just researchers, but teachers. We all know that joyful experience when the ideas we present to our students find open ears and minds. As we have detailed the first contribution so far mostly, let us now concentrate on the educational viewpoint (implicitly present in the former as well). 

We have witnessed misunderstandings and flawed interpretations of epidemiological dynamics in our everyday interactions. We believe that these phenomena are present in the population globally and contribute to non-adherence and noncompliance even under emergency circumstances. Our gamified educational materials will provide understanding of the key concepts we identified to combat the aforementioned phenomena, e.g.  

• Interventions and their timescale (delayed effect)

• Country-level herd immunity does not imply local herd immunity

• Exponential growth

• Florida effect (age-mixing disease transmission patterns)

• Observed data correlates with dynamics in the past

• Disease burden of the peak is of the same magnitude (taking place in a short-run!) as of the preceding months

Our motto: everybody loves to play. We strongly believe that the gamified educational environment offers the prospect to motivate and inspire both young and adult individuals. And precisely that motivation and inspiration are what will result in long-term interaction with Learnemic solutions.

Gamified educational tools have readily proven to be efficient, especially in increasing audience motivation and inspiration. On the other hand, the quality of learning outcome is often subpar to that of conventional, focused education. But gamified tools have a much broader potential reach. The estimated number of video games users exceeds 3 billion globally! Albeit it is nowhere realistic to expect even a moderate portion of these individuals to become involved with Learnemic products, just a minor fraction would enlarge our virtual classroom beyond imagination! As a secret hope, we would like to witness above-average activity from developing regions. We are aware of the associated technological challenges and readily collected numerous ideas on transforming some components of the gamified educational environment into low-cost offline solutions, e.g. games cut from cardboard or played as a communal activity.

In order to increase the number of user-solution interactions for our experience-based gamified educational program, we will rely heavily on partnerships with NGOs or (in absence of that) with local governmental authorities. First, it is through these partnerships that we can get traction and direct deployment in developing focus regions. Second, the same key stakeholders can provide us with user feedback and impact assessment in remote locations. The building of the partner network of organizations working on bettering health awareness and education in developing regions will start in the first year - after we have realized our prototype creative concept. 

The gamified modeling solution will be supported by continuous marketing campaigns with a gradually increasing reach. For securing a long-term, sustainable economy of our project, establishing our presence in developed countries is a prerequisite. Hence, partnering marketing professionals and the design of campaign strategies will start right after the delivery of the final creative concept. The campaigns themselves will begin after the delivery of final software solutions -  allocating sufficient time for strategic design.

We have different impact criteria for the two components, though “download count” will be an important factor in evaluating the reach and success of both app-based products. 

Considering the real-time strategy game exposing epidemic management in augmented reality to the user, we expect to reach 100k downloads within the first 6 months following deployment (supported by an agile marketing campaign) and 200k within the first year. Exponential growth is a concept vital to epidemics modeling, hence, we are aware of the caveats of utilizing it in defining our milestones. Nevertheless, our market research of currently available games with epidemic context makes us set the ambitious lower limit goal of 1m downloads by the end of the 3rd year with aspiration for a considerably larger number.

We do not expect such level of reach, measured in direct downloads, from the non-profit arm with a central focus on gamified education. We aspire to partner with NGOs to deliver our solution preinstalled. We have readily got in contact with Global Giving and they expressed their interest in connecting us with NGOs that can help. We expect to reach 10k deployments within the first year and 30k by the end of the third.

We expect preliminary deployment of the solution to begin after 6 - 9 months. Local validation and testing will take place in Hungary. Potential barriers and our strategies to overcome them are detailed separately for the two arms of our solution.

Educational arm:

We have limited experience with reaching developing regions outside the European Union. 

First, we will leverage connections with Hungarian educational companies that readily maintain a presence outside the EU. Our first go-to is “Mozaik” which shares headquarters with our venture and is present in more than 38 countries. 

Second, cooperation with NGOs and local governments is a must. We have readily got in contact with Global Giving and they expressed their interest in connecting us with NGOs. Naturally, we look for guidance and partnership with those Trinity Challenge Members who can expedite building the necessary connections.

Gamified modeling arm:

We do not consider advertising as major expertise of ours. Planning, creating, and deploying marketing strategies must be carried out leveraging professional counseling and development. We have not yet identified our future collaborator(s). Selection and partnering will be prioritized, in parallel, with concept and software development. The relevant Trinity Challenge Members are most welcome as counsel or partner.

The modeling work we carried out at University of Szeged, Hungary serves as a starting point for our solution.

Obtaining initial funding is but the first step for such projects as ours. The real difficulty comes while scaling up to be accessible in distant geographical regions. Successful participation on The Trinity Challenge would directly pave part of this road by the acquired visibility and, more importantly, by potential partnership with several of the challenge members.

IHME: Their epidemic modeling framework shares many traits with what we developed. We also believe in the power of open access to epidemiological modeling. We’d be thrilled to cooperate with IHME on model development for past, present, and future epidemics.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: The BMGF has demonstrated on multiple occasions its dedication to enhancing healthcare and addressing the challenge posed by COVID-19. Should our project arouse their interest, we could directly connect with their vast network of NGOs for enabling expedite deployment of our solution in developing regions. 

Google: Our solution will be made available for all major mobile platforms including Google’s Android. Optimal framing and positioning of our software would greatly increase its reach and visibility. Who else to partner with than Google when it comes to such tasks?

Facebook & Google: Marketing campaigns carried out using these two platforms have the potential for global reach. Their assistance would certainly deem to be one of the most valuable assets.